Section: US & Canada

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko conceded Monday that his forces are unable to militarily defeat separatists backed by Russian mercenaries and armaments, and he called for a new attempt at negotiating an end to the fighting at an international summit on Jan. 15. …read more Source: Los Angeles...

MOSCOW—A Moscow court on Monday moved up the date of its verdict in a criminal case against President Vladimir Putin’s top foe in an apparent bid to derail a planned protest. Earlier this month, prosecutors asked the court to convict Alexei Navalny of defrauding a cosmetics company and to sentence him to 10 years in prison. Navalny, who has...

If 2014 proved anything, it’s that guessing at the state of the world a year down the line is a vain or even slightly embarrassing endeavor. Indeed, who could have expected a year ago that Russia would take over Crimea, ISIS would break out of Al Qaeda and declare a caliphate, the US would start bombing Syria and Iraq while approaching a...

There’s a lot to be learned from a person’s Google searches. Real estate listings site Estately looked at Google Trends data to determine what people, stories, and controversies residents of each state cared about most. The map they compiled using the data shows not what each state searched for the most overall, but what they Googled...

It’s been quite a year. What better way to review the last 365 days than to examine, analyze, drool over and gush about the work of photojournalists and photographers, who worked to capture everything from protests to parades, scandals to celebrations, clashes to christenings? Behold, the 52 best photographs from around the world in 2014.1....

The ruble is collapsing again. The currency dropped by as much as 9.3% on Monday — the biggest decline since December 15. This crash follows the Economy Ministry’s announcement that GDP contracted by 0.5% from a year earlier, following a 0.5% increase in October. “This is linked to sanctions first of all, oil and the panic we saw on...

I hated what happened to Russia in 2014 so much that I decided to move away. It’s safe to say, however, that 2015 will be worse. President Vladimir Putin’s regime is on the verge of transitioning from mild authoritarianism to outright dictatorship. The country’s newly amended military doctrine is an especially ominous sign....

Each year since 1946, Gallup has asked Americans to name the living man or woman they most admire. The top vote-getters for 2014, announced on Monday, were no surprise: Barack Obama claimed victory in the male category for the seventh straight year, while Hillary Clinton extended her even more impressive run as “most admired woman”...

The oil price drop that has dominated the headlines in recent weeks has been framed almost exclusively in terms of oil market economics, with most media outlets blaming Saudi Arabia, through its OPEC Trojan horse, for driving down the price, thus causing serious damage to the world’s major oil exporters – most notably Russia. While the...